DiamondMax 4320 17.2G

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DiamondMax 4320 17.2G - Page 1

The
Maxtor DiamondMax 4320 - 17.2G EIDE/UDMA Hard Drive

A
JUMBO Drive For The Hungriest Of Users

Are
you feeling a little thin on space these days with the ol' workhorse
2 Gig drive you are running? Time to put that poor thing out to
pasture... Have we got some room for you! I'm talking "fit a
small tribe of Gypsies" size room here! 17.2 Gig ! Holy
Mackerel! Do you remember being excited about your new shiny Mode 3
drive, a whole 540 Meg? Guess what? Drive Technology just leap
frogged you and it doesn't show any signs of ending anytime soon.
The DiamondMax 4320 - 17.2G may not be the largest drive on the
planet but it is up there in the top 5% of all drives in the
marketplace. Here are the specs...

DiamondMax
4320 Model # 91728D8

17.2GB,
5400 RPM

Average
Seek 9.0 ms Read and Write

PIO
4 and UDMA/33 Data Transfer Modes

512KB
SDRAM Buffer

On
Board Digital Signal Processor

On
Board Flash EPROM For Firmware Updates

S.M.A.R.T.
Function Support

Features

There are a
number of things that set this drive apart from the rest. First,
this is a 9.0 Millisecond Drive. Compared to the IBM drive we
reviewed here, this is only .5ms faster. That seems trivial but it
is not when you are transferring data at up to 33MB/sec. Every tenth
of a millisecond adds up. Next is the drive's DSP supported design.
Maxtor uses Texas Instrument DSPs in their drives which I feel
really help the drive process data. A lot of drive vendors use
custom ASICs (Application Specific I.C.s) and I am not familiar with
their effectiveness but the Maxtor/T.I. approach works well. Another
interesting feature is the drives on board ST Micro 1Mbit Flash
EPROM for holding the drives firmware. If there are ever
compatibility problems in the future ( we didn't find any during our
tests ), you'll most likely be able to fix it with a Flash Update.
Last but not the least, this drive uses fast SDRAM for its data
buffer.

Notice,
for this drive review, we ran our tests at 515 Mhz. This drive was
as stable as the IBM drive in all tests. This drive should serve you
well if you intend to overclock. OK, here's how she ran vrs. our IBM
Rocket...

Higher
scores represent better performance.

BX6-2.0
Maxtor

BX6-2.0
IBM

WinBench
99/Business Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

3000

2840

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/Bus:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

3000

2840

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:AVS/Express 3.4 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

4500

6430

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:FrontPage 98 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

45100

36900

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:MicroStation SE (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

7940

8950

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Overall (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

8710

9310

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Photoshop 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

6430

5380

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Premiere 4.2 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

8290

8440

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Sound Forge 4.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

14100

15200

WinBench
99/Disk Playback/HE:Visual C++ 5.0 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

11600

11500

WinBench
99/High-End Disk WinMark 99 (Thousand Bytes/Sec)

8710

9310

System
Info/CPU Clock Speed Reported

517

517

Surprisingly,
this was a very close race. The IBM disk is a little slower on the
Business side of things primarily because of its slightly slower
access speed of 9.5ms. However, the IBM disk beat out the Maxtor on
the High End Disk WinMark because of its faster spindle speed at
7,200 RPM which translates to higher data transfer rates.
Regardless, this Maxtor 17 Gig is no slouch and will probably give
other inferior 7200 RPM drives a run for their money! Let's
reconfirm our findings. On to Wintune...

WinTune
98 Offline Test Results

CPU

(1)
Intel Pentium II with MMX@502 MHz

Video
Board

NVidia
RIVA TNT

Video
Mode

1024x768@16bits/pixel

RAM

128
MB

OS

Windows
98 4.10.1998

Area
Tested

IBM Drive
Values

Maxtor
Drive Values

CPU
Integer

1494.634
MIPS

1494.469
MIPS

CPU
Floating Point

599.4976
MFLOPS

595.6667
MFLOPS

Video(2D)

97.69372
MPixels/s

97.66038
MPixels/s

Direct3D

106.9294
MPixels/s

106.8499
MPixels/s

OpenGL

87.59
MPixels/s

87.3135
MPixels/s

Memory

885.0853
MB/s

893.4647
MB/s

Cached
Disk

110.2826
MB/s

103.8133
MB/s

Uncached
Disk

3.346395
MB/s

3.727367
MB/s

Once
again, very comparable performance from the Maxtor unit. This is a
solid fast drive and a great value!

In
summary, I found this drive to be a fast and stable performer. The
drive is also somewhat quieter than the IBM drive and runs slightly
cooler to the touch as well. This drive would make a fine addition
in space to your system and would accomodate your needs for months
maybe even years to come. That is saying alot in a market where
technology outdates itself every 6 months. Where can you get this
drive? Funny you should ask! The good folks at TJT International
have it for just $289 !!! Such a deal!! TJT is a great place for
drives! They have good service and great prices. They are one of the
largest drive distributors in the U.S. Tell Mike M. that Dave at Hot
Hardware sent you!

We give this bad
boy a "Temp-O-Meter" rating of...

90
!! Damn!
dats hot!

(Temp-O-Meter
scores are rated on a number of key metrics including performance,
stability, ease of installation, compatibility, feature set, "overclockability"
and component quality. A perfect score is 100 )